Last semester I took Social Inequalities for my sociology major, and it is probably a class that I would encourage anyone who doesn’t plan on being a hermit for the rest of their lives to take. I learned so much about how different people view the world, and even in a class of 250 or so, we actually had some good discussion.
One thing we learned about in this class was the concept of cultural capital, which is basically that not only does having wealth and stuff help people to get ahead, but it asserts that having culture helps you too. An example my teacher used was like knowing what fork to use at a fancy restaurant. Those kind of basic cultural things which if you have grown up in that society, were instilled in you by your parents, but if you grew up in a different part of American culture, they can seem as foreign as another country.
I grew up on a farm about 12 miles outside of the closest town, in an extremely rural area, and as I think about cultural capital it just resonates with me how deprived rural children are of knowing how or just knowing about the things city kids know about.
Some examples I can think of from my growing up years are that when I was in middle school, my gifted class went on a field trip to the chinese restaurant in Macon (30 miles away). This was a class made up of probably 10 of the smartest kids at South Shelby Middle School, and there were a few of them who had never eaten chinese before. Had they not had that field trip, I honestly don’t know if they would have ever experienced that. Another example that really stands out is that when I took college level biology, we took a field trip to the St. Louis Zoo (3 hours away) and there were classmates of mine who had never seen zoo animal’s before. If I sat and really thought hard, I could come up with dozens of examples similar to this. I know of classmates who in middle and high school had never been out of the state of Missouri except to go to the mall in Quincy, Illinois; which is an hour away.
I know that culturally I have been blessed by having parents who actively sought out things for me and my sisters to do and trips to take which could enrich us educationally and culturally. Whether they knew what they were doing when they did so, I’m not sure.
It saddens me that in a lot of rural schools field trips are one of the first things to be cut from the budget, along with programs in the arts. These classes and trips add another dimension which ultimately give rural children the best chance to succeed, no matter what they end up doing or where they end up going.
